1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an intelligent work station which can effectively cope with an inquiry received by means of a telephone speech input.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, a transfer collation service of banks utilizing a telephone is receiving a lot of attention. In this service function, numerical information indicating an ID number and the like which is speech-input from an arbitrary telephone terminal through a telephone line is recognized, information (numerals, words, or phrases) stored in an information storage (database) is retrieved and extracted based on the recognition result, and the extracted information is speech-output through the telephone line. More specifically, necessary information is retrieved in accordance with speech information input from a telephone, and the retrieved information is speech-responded through the telephone.
Due to a tendency toward use of a variety of information in the contemporary society, the number of kinds of information inquiries using a telephone is increasing. For example, it is proposed to process not only an inquiry of numerical data for an interbank transfer mentioned above but also an inquiry of a route from a nearest station to a destination.
When an inquiry of a route is to be processed, it is preferable that a response is obtained in a graphic form such as a guide map.
In a conventional work station, pieces of route information for various targets are stored in a database as graphic (image) data of guide maps, and a response is made to an inquiry by outputting a guide map image using an image communication means such as a facsimile (FAX).
However, an inquiry using a telephone is not always made from a telephone terminal comprising a FAX function. Inquiries are often made from public telephones having no FAX function. In this case, since a guide map image cannot be output, a document guiding the route must be output as speech data. Guidances representing contents of guide maps can thus be registered in the database as well as the graphic (image) data of the guide maps, and these document and graphic data can be selectively output in accordance with the type of a telephone terminal from which the inquiry is made.
In order to realize such an inquiry response, since the database must store not only graphic (image) data representing the guide maps but also their guidances, a memory capacity required for the database becomes extremely large. In addition, management of the information is much complicated.
Furthermore, since guidances representing routes must be created in advance in correspondence with the guide maps, the document creation process requires much labor.
In a conventional work station, when various inquiries by a telephone are to be processed, the memory capacity of a database for storing response information is much increased, and much labor is required for creating guidances corresponding to guide maps.